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merely unattractive but revolting to him, and he could take no further
interest in it.
To this now was joined the presence, only twenty-five miles off, of
Kitty Shtcherbatskaya, whom he longed to see and could not see. Darya
Alexandrovna Oblonskaya had invited him, when he was over there,
to come; to come with the object of renewing his offer to her sister, who
would, so she gave him to understand, accept him now. Levin himself
had felt on seeing Kitty Shtcherbatskaya that he had never ceased to
love her; but he could not go over to the Oblonskys’, knowing she was
there. The fact that he had made her an offer, and she had refused
him, had placed an insuperable barrier between her and him. “I can’t
ask her to be my wife merely because she can’t be the wife of the man
she wanted to marry,” he said to himself. The thought of this made him
cold and hostile to her. “I should not be able to speak to her without a
feeling of reproach; I could not look at her without resentment; and she
will only hate me all the more, as she’s bound to. And besides, how can
I now, after what Darya Alexandrovna told me, go to see them? Can I
help showing that I know what she told me? And me to go magnani-
mously to forgive her, and have pity on her! Me go through a perfor-
mance before her of forgiving, and deigning to bestow my love on her!...
What induced Darya Alexandrovna to tell me that? By chance I
might have seen her, then everything would have happened of itself;
but, as it is, it’s out of the question, out of the question!”
Darya Alexandrovna sent him a letter, asking him for a side-saddle
for Kitty’s use. “I’m told you have a side-saddle,” she wrote to him; “I
hope you will bring it over yourself.”
This was more than he could stand. How could a woman of any
intelligence, of any delicacy, put her sister in such a humiliating posi-
tion! He wrote ten notes, and tore them all up, and sent the saddle
without any reply. To write that he would go was impossible, because
he could not go; to write that he could not come because something
prevented him, or that he would be away, that was still worse. He sent
the saddle without an answer, and with a sense of having done some-
thing shameful; he handed over all the now revolting business of the
estate to the bailiff, and set off next day to a remote district to see his
friend Sviazhsky, who had splendid marshes for grouse in his neigh-
borhood, and had lately written to ask him to keep a long-standing
promise to stay with him. The grouse-marsh, in the Surovsky district,
had long tempted Levin, but he had continually put off this visit on
account of his work on the estate. Now he was glad to get away from
the neighborhood of the Shtcherbatskys, and still more from his farm
work, especially on a shooting expedition, which always in trouble served
as the best consolation.